Fukuzawa couldn’t sit around and wait any longer. He’d thought he might run into Ranpo if he waited in the lobby, but now he needed to go search for him.
Fukuzawa stood up and began to walk. Ranpo didn’t have enough time to go too far, so asking around if anyone saw him would be his best bet. Fukuzawa visualized the theater’s layout in his head. There were three entrances: the front entrance used by the patrons, the dressing room entrance used by the actors and staff, and the service entrance used to transport stage equipment. The front entrance would take playgoers into the lobby, which would lead you to the theater hall and ticket counter. Then the dressing room entrance led to the dressing room, rehearsal room, office, and meeting room. Finally, the service entrance opened into the storage chamber and warehouse with a passageway to backstage. It wasn’t impossible to come and go through these entranceways, but they were essentially closed spaces. Namely, the theatergoers’ territory and the troupe’s territory were segregated.
If Ranpo disappeared near one
of these entranceways, the most suspicious place would be around the unoccupied storage chamber and warehouse. The front entrance was occasionally used by people other than patrons, and performers were waiting for their part around the dressing room, which meant there would be witnesses. Furthermore, the storage chamber and warehouse were closest to where that puzzling murder took place. If there was a place to set up a remote murdering device, then that would be the place, and that would be where Ranpo went to stop it.
Fukuzawa passed by the seats in the theater hall and headed for the stage. Anxious customers sat as they were told to and nervously waited for the situation to change. The panic was gone, but the unusual circumstances still left people in fear. A few theater workers were interviewing the sitting customers one by one, asking them what they had seen and if they noticed anyone gone.
Was the killer among them? Or were they a member of the troupe? Perhaps it was someone who worked at the theater? Fukuzawa suppressed the urge to grab each one of them by the collar and question them as he crossed over the scene of the crime toward backstage.
The backstage area was bare and wide. Wooden boxes and boards were lined up with lighting apparatuses. The two steel wires that ran across the floor must have been rails for swiftly transporting the set.
Fukuzawa looked up at the ceiling from the stage. Right after the murder, he had looked up and seen some sort of metal box past the lights. If that was some sort of remotely controlled device that dropped blades, then it would all make sense.
But there was nothing on the catwalk. He checked backstage just in case, but there was nothing there, either. Were his eyes playing tricks on him? Was there no metal box? Or did the killer get rid of it immediately after the murder? But a device that could drop knives and immediately pull them back up had to be large. If someone had carried such a big object, then Fukuzawa would have seen it. Right as he started to walk away, there was a sudden commotion coming from the lobby. A cop came rushing over before whispering something in a flurry to a worker near the stage.
“What’s going on?” Fukuzawa asked after approaching the officer.
The pale-faced officer appeared to have remembered Fukuzawa and immediately answered.
“Th-they’re gone! Somebody in the audience disappeared!”
“What?!”
A few officers were talking in the lobby with worried expressions. They showed one another their police notes and went over the current situation. Fukuzawa made sure his footsteps were heard as he approached.
“Hey,” he said to them.
One officer lifted up his head.
“Oh. Hey there. Nice to have ya with us, Watchdog.”
“Watchdog”? He wasn’t entirely wrong, but there was something comical about the name. Nevertheless, now wasn’t the time to be correcting people.
Fukuzawa got straight to the point. “I heard one of the patrons escaped.”
“Sure did. We’re still having trouble finding the guy.” The officer rubbed at his cheek in a circular motion. “Just so there’s no confusion, we have all the exits sealed off perfectly. There’s no way anyone got out of this building. I mean, we’re allowing people to go to the restroom or to get first-aid if they’re not feeling well, so getting out of their seat itself isn’t really a problem. But…”
“Did somebody not come back?”
“Exactly. They weren’t in their seat or the bathroom. We can’t find ’em anywhere.”
“Where did they sit? What did they look like?”
The officer used the seating chart to show where the runaway sat. The patron had been seated in the very front.
“It was a middle-aged gentleman wearing an overcoat, a navy suit, and a bowler hat. I asked around, and apparently, he was also using a cane ’cause he had a bad leg.”
Fukuzawa immediately knew who it was.
Him.
It was the distinguished gentleman in the front row who was observing the performers—the man who had set off Fukuzawa’s instincts.
“Reservation records say his name is Takutou Asano. Thirty-five years old. He came alone.”
“Takutou Asano”? …Oh, like Naganori Asano, Takumi no Kami.